Recent murder of Niloy Chatterjee, and the accompanying outcry, has again lead to the thesis in the domestic and international media that religion, in this case Islam, is at the heart of all violence in Bangladesh. The article looks at depth into such reporting and seeks to answer the question: Is the current practice of Islam responsible for the recent upsurge in violence in Bangladesh?

By Surma

The Killing Fields of Bangladesh

Picture of Baby shot in the womb of his mother in Magura, Bangladesh, by political cadres of the current ruling Awami League .

Bangladesh this summer again is revisited with the spectre of the another gruesome killing of an online activist, this time Niloy Chatterjee. The killing is not isolated but is part of an epidemic of disappearances, murder, torture and kidnappings which are occurring all over the country. Human Rights activist, at great risk, have tried to highlight this ‘dirty war’, pointing their collective fingers towards the current Awami League government and its security forces.

In Bangladesh, in this context of mainly state sponsored violence, there has been much discussion in social media, about the circumstances surrounding the Niloy Chatterjee’s death. Some commentators, came up with an interesting hypothesis, not attributing the gruesome killings to Ayman Zawahiri and Al Qaida, but that to other possible players. A good summary can be found in the writings of the social media activist Talukdar Shaheb.

It now appears, according to the domestic press in Bangladesh, that individuals connected to the ruling ‘secular’ Awami League government have been arrested, in particular a nephew of the Minister for Labour and Employment. In contrast to the vibrant discussion in Bangladesh surrounding Chatterjee’s death on social media, sadly many international journalists, it seems, are happy to ignore the present context and trot out the usual lazy stereotypes of starry eyed ‘Mad Mullahs’ running amok in Bangladesh.

A Bollywood Rerun of Burke’s Law

‘Burke’s Law’, now solving international crimes: Above: Screenshot of TV Series Burke’s Law. Below: Picture of the late Niloy Chatterjee

One particular example of this type of lazy journalism is Jason Burke’s piece in the London Guardian, an investigative piece on the face of it but with closer reading, it becomes a pale imitation of US TV hit show Burke’s Law. In the TV series Amos Burke, a millionaire police captain, is chauffeured around in a Rolls Royce, simultaneously solving murders while sipping champagne and enjoying the high life. In our case Jason Burke is over thousand miles away in Delhi, chauffeured through the mental terrain of Bangladesh by his trusted sidekick Saad Hammadi, solving crimes in Bangladesh without having to step inside the country.

In the piece Jason Burke follows the age old technique of developing a distorted picture of Bangladesh for his readers. First he whitewashes the story in a strong solution of decontextualization, by failing to mention in detail the wider spate of killing and violence that has been engulfing the country for the past years. Second, he distorts his piece with unequal representation, there is a direct quote from Imran H Sarkar but no quotes from Conservative Muslims in Bangladesh that oppose Mr Sarkar. Thirdly this unequal representation, allows the picture to develop in a dark room of non being. Where one side is humanised, and has a name and simultaneously the Conservative Muslim voice, is dehumanised into mindless mob, tenuously linked to the murder and transformed into non beings at the same time.

One is surprised that such epistemic racism is allowed to flourish at the left leaning progressive Guardian. Also I expected Jason Burke, being the Guardian’s expert on the ‘War on Terror’ (having authored four books according to the website), to have a more nuanced and thoughtful article. However when reading his other works in the newspaper I am not surprised. In a piece on key books on Muslim Extremism, Jason Burke summarises, ‘The Islamist’, an autobiographical work by the British Bangladeshi Ed Husain, as: “Excellent on the cultural gap between first generation Pakistani Immigrants and their children in the UK”. I guess according to Jason Burke and the application of his ‘Burke’s Law’, all us Pakis look the same!

(Paki is a derogatory term used by racists in the UK to describe all South Asians)

Burke’s article on Bangladesh follows the memes of many writings by Westerners on Bangladesh, who in essence argue that religion is at the heart of all violence in Bangladesh. This sentiment is echoed in academic circles, where even violence and repression perpetrated by the ‘Progressive and Secular’ Awami League government is blamed on religion. For example David Lewis at the LSE somewhat justifies government repression in Bangladesh, as a defensive posture against religious violence. Leading to the question, is religion, in our case Islam at the heart of all violence in Bangladesh?

The tradition of tolerance in Bangladesh

Interpreting the picture: Familiar medieval scene of congregation prayer, with a Qalandar (Baul) in the corner (right of the picture) left unharassed and tolerated by the orthodox members of the congregation. Ibn Taymiyyah in his Majmua al Fatawah, upholds the prevalent tradition, by advocating tolerance of the unorthodox Qalandars.

Looking at the available data on violence in Bangladesh, majority of violence is either attributed to criminal gangs or state security forces. Even one looks at violence by political parties, two out of the three main players are secular, therefore using a rough rule of thumb majority of political violence in the country is non religious. This leaves us the theoretical question, is the practice and articulation of Islam in Bangladesh one that is necessary or in essence violent ? Again the historical and empirical data would suggest otherwise, historically and until the present day, dotted across many villages in Bangladesh Muslims and Hindus communities have coexisted together. Also contrary to popular perception, Islam in Bangladesh has never been monolithic nor uniform, with various theological schools within Sunni Islam, living side by side with no outbreaks of any sectarian violence.

As a way of explaining such discrepancies, many writers have posited the binary of Syncretic Bengali Islam vs Foreign Wahhabi Islam. Wahabi Islam gaining the upperhand in Bangladesh due to the unlimited oil money of the Saudis. Again looking at the empirical data the influence is negligible. For example, looking at the core and regular practice of prayer (namaz/salah), in Saudi Arabia the practice is to pray with hands above the navel or single cycle of prayer (rakat) performed for the late evening Witr prayer, but in Bangladesh, anecdotally wherever I went, everyone prayed with their hands below the navel and three cycles of prayers were performed for the Witr Prayer.

Sections of the elite as well as writers and journalists still continue with the argument, pointing not to quantifiable practices but to a an abstract foreign ‘Wahhabi’ ideology that has infected the body politic of Bangladesh, in particular the works of Ibn Taymiyyah.

Such theories appear to be convenient fig leafs for inconvenient facts, leaving more questions unanswered than solved. If the Wahabi movement has been around for over 200 years, if it is so powerful, why does it have an impact now? Why does Saudi Arabia, despite being bordered by the failed states of Iraq and Yemen, the motherland of such violent ideology, has a lower violence and crime statistics than Bangladesh and many Western countries? Why is this myth still peddled by elites, writers and journalists in Bangladesh, when it has already been debunked in academic circles?

An unbiased review of the current data and evidence, points to an alternative source to the violence that is engulfing Bangladesh. We should not be fooled by the fact that the violence may be couched in religious symbols or language. The manipulation of religion is not a recent phenomena in Bangladesh, nor is it the sole prerogative of the ‘religious right’, it is a universal and established practice of the powerful. Who can forget the pronouncements of the ‘secular’ Awami League government, in following the Medinan Constitution or that no laws will go against Quran or Sunnah.

Taking a step back from the present, without the prejudice against the sacred traditions of the land and looking back into the history of Bangladesh, the spikes in violence cannot be attributed to the constant of deep attachment the Bangladeshi people had for the sacred. The spikes of violence that we witnessed in our recent history in 1947, the crisis leading to and including 1971, the BAKSAL of 1973 and now the violence of the current political crisis, lies squarely instead at the inability of the elites of the country to come to a compromise rather than the religious beliefs held by the common people.

The roots of the present violence, sprout from the feet of the current Awami League Government. The crisis was sparked by the mishandling/politicisation of the War Crimes Trials and the suspension of free and fair elections. These unilateral steps by the Government has shattered the political consensus that existed in the country since the 1990s. It has created a political vacuum, creating a winner takes all situation for the Government and and a do die situation for its opponents, thus giving the illusion of violence as the panacea for the malaise perceived by both parties.

On the other hand, International backers of the Awami League government either in Delhi or in the West, instead of restraining the violence, maintain and fan it. They are all too eager to prop up and paint the current crisis in a clash of civilisation colours. This manufacturing of a new front on the ‘War on Terror’, has the desired effect in justifying new budgets for their ever burgeoning Military Industrial Complex (cue the useful idiots of Bangladesh Studies).

The history of Bangladesh has not been a continuous orgy of violence, there have been long periods that did see stability and reduction of violence. The catalyst for the periods of peace, was the ability of the elites of the country to compromise. The first instance was in 1975, in a series outlined by the blogger Jyoti Rahman, it was Zia Rahman’s genius for compromise that steered the country from the initial chaos under the Awami League dictatorship, to stability and normalcy. The second period was the unified effort by all parties to depose the Ershad dictatorship and the formation of a new democratic political arrangement in the 1990s.It is the abandonment of this ancient wisdom of tolerance and compromise that has lead to the spate of violence in Bangladesh. Intolerance emanating from the elites feeding down to the common man in the street as innocent victims of collateral damage.

Looking at the privileged young marchers of Shahbag and their slogans, reading the opinions pieces and accompanying comments on Bangladesh, a silent melancholy sigh takes over the soul. I hear in my heart the lament of W B Yeats, in his poem Byzantium. The young have forgotten the age old wisdom of their elders, thus mistaking the onward march of intolerance with the onward march of progress…

“THAT is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees

– Those dying generations – at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect”

W B Yeats – Sailing to Byzantium

March to Progress or Intolerance? Left: Torchlight Rally at Shahbag and Right: Torchlight Rally in Nazi Germany

We try to interrogate the Truth of the Events unfolding in Bangladesh, and claims of the death of secularism. We ask if society is experiencing a silenced, spiritual revolution and present important reference materials to make sense of the politics of curricular change, the times of Al Ghazali and the contents of the much maligned Darse Nizami. With both secular and more than secular spaces struggling to make space for history, epistemic plurality and colonial continuity we travel through China, East London and Sylhet to demonstrate how texts and people flow and interact. We amplify excluded voices, to give new readings to Events in Bangladesh today.

Avijit Roy Murder: In the search of the Truth after the Event

When the then British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan was asked what can most easily steer a government off course, he answered “Events, dear boy. Events”. One of the truisms of the statement being, is that our subjective perception of the truth is tied to ‘Events’ that we witness in our lives.

In recent times in Bangladesh, the Avijit Roy murder, seems to have shifted the knowledge of what Bangladesh means. Avijit was the joint founder of the website Mukto Mona, and was slain in mysterious circumstances in February 2015. The Bangladesh government of the day as well the corporate media has blamed the death on shadowy Islamist terrorists. The meaning derived from the ‘Event’ being, Bangladesh is now an irrational conservative Islamic country, where secular and atheist bloggers and writers fear for their lives. Even The New York Times joined in the chorus following the murder, declaring in an op ed piece, the end of secularism in Bangladesh.

In sharp contrast, two years ago, during the Shahbag protests for the hanging of Abdul Quader Mollah. The ‘Event’ was described mainly as knowledge that Bangladesh was a secular and progressive country, where as an exception to the rule, conservative Islamic forces have been beaten back and were in full retreat. So looking at the current coverage of Bangladesh, it appears the country has gone through some kind of revolution, where there has been a dramatic shift in society, within a short period of time. Or has it?

Could it be that much of the current English and Bangla social commentary on recent developments in Bangladesh is ill informed, malicious and self censored? For example if the supposed epidemic in ‘Atheist Killings’ weren’t confusing enough, Ahmede Hussain recently confused Deoband with Aligarh, in regards to being supported by the British Empire. Systematically appalling coverage prevents the public from learning and discussing underlying issues, and frames everything in terms of a third rate Hindi soap opera, produced through the pockets of the power elite.

Rage against the Nastiks (Militant Atheists): Voices from the ‘Other’ Bangladesh

Glorified is My Lord, The Magnificent: An image of congregational prayer on the streets of Dhaka 2013. Islami Andolon Bangladesh gathered in the capital to protest corruption and nepotism as well as demand restoration of the caretaker government system for political transition and new legal protections against religious defamation

Proponents and supporters of Mukto Mona would posit their writings in terms of progress and modernity, and would see themselves as the intellectual successors to the 19th century, Calcuttan, Bengali Renaissance. Their core proposition is that religion poisons everything, that it is a belief based on feeling rather than fact, hence religion is at the root of most of the problems of Bangladesh. This seems to be the general view that seems to permeate elite discourse within the country, conscious or otherwise.

However, when searching for the Truth of the ‘Event’, we have to go beyond the knowledge and discourse generated by the power structure , in our case the Bangladeshi government, elite commentators and the corporate media. We have to listen and address the voices excluded, and observe the material being reconfigured, in order to have a complete picture of the Truth. Incorporating both sides of the binary, whilst queering that binary challenges the interests gathered around the dominant pole. From a socioeconomic perspective, both sides of the debate generally fit into social classes created by widening economic inequality, initiated in colonial times and maintained by the post colonial state.

Conservative, mainly excluded voices in Bangladesh, would place the writings of Mukto Mona and its supporters within the binary of the ‘Astik vs Nastik’ debate, or militant atheist vs people of faith debate. In a background of increasing political turmoil and state security suppression, the disenfranchised conservative mood in the country manifested itself in the 2013 Hefazote protests in Dhaka. Where on two separate occasions, it is believed that over 1 million people participated in the protests. The organisers, Hefazote Islam, had a 13 point demand, the second point of the demand being:

“to stop all the anti-islamic propaganda of the self declared atheist and murtad leaders of so-called Shahbag movement and bloggers who propagate lies against the Prophet (saw) and to punish them.”

In the run up to and in the aftermath of the Dhaka massacre of May 2013, I asked Hefazote supporters as to the meaning of the 2nd point in their 13 point demand, and as to why they were so agitated by insults from atheists and former Muslim writers.

One made the issue of the difference in terms if genealogies, which leads to misunderstandings. Apostasy, in the English language, means for someone to change their minds about religion. Apostasy and apostates, using an Islamic genealogy is better translated as ‘nifaq or ‘munafiq’’. He then went onto argue, that the Prophet Muhammad (saw), knew who the apostates were and didn’t kill them. Many made the point that they were simply asking for the implementation of existing laws against hate speech.

Nearly all gave a reply that one had to distinguish between atheism and what they termed Militant Atheism. Atheism on its own is a non positive assertion, it is to believe there is no god, it is ambivalent as to whether god or religion is force for good or evil. They pointed out the Muslims in past have had a long history of coexisting with atheists, from the earliest community to the present time. For example there are the famous public debates Imam Abu Hanifah had with the atheists of his time.

‘Nastiks’ or Militant Atheists, they argued, step outside the prism of a traditional atheist, from a passive position to an aggressive one, from ‘I have no god’ to ‘you should have no god’. These ‘Nastiks’ they argued, are not equal in their hatred of religions, they are entirely fixated with Islam. As an example, they stated that this discrimination and hatred against Islam in Bangladesh is expressed explicitly, from the ban on University admissions to Madrassah students, to bans on the headscarf (hijab) in various workplaces. Implicitly it is found in reading the works of famous novelists and images in the media, in the portrayal of the characters of religious people. Such evidences are replete in Bengali dramas, novels, stories and other media and genres. An evil character is always portrayed by the image of an Islamic person, with the beard, outfits such as tupi, long dresses and lungi or pyjamas.

In conversations, social media and in their writings, proponents of such discrimination and prejudice towards observant Muslims and Islam in Bangladesh, would justify it in the name of muscular secularism. They lay out a dichotomy between a Medieval God centred Muslim culture in opposition to an Aryanising progressive world view. Thus discrimination and suppression of Muslim culture and practices is the necessary price of progress and development. Concluding, that Islam and Muslim culture in its very essence is barbaric and backwards, and its effect on society should be limited and mitigated where possible.

Black Swans: A Snapshot of the Qawmi Experience in the UK

A seminar on the Philosophy of Islamic Science and Modern Technology by Professor Datuk Osman Bakar in a Qawmi Madrassah in East London, attended by madrassah students, professionals, medics and academics. March 2015.

Looking at statistical evidence worldwide the argument that Muslims and Islam at their very essence are anti modern or development, does not hold. Many Muslim countries enjoy high per capita wealth income, some with higher than or equal to many Western countries. Even if we restrict the field to the context of Bangladesh, using the extreme example of Qawmi Madrassas both in UK and Bangladesh, the argument seems not to hold.

In recent times in Bangladesh, most of the debate around Qawmi Madrasahs, under the influence and guidance of foreign governments, is around how they are creating a large pool of graduates unable to function in a modern economy and society. Most of the arguments concluding that they need to come under state control under the guise of curriculum reform. Images of Qawmi Madrassah’s and graduates are used often in the corporate press both at home in Bangladesh and abroad to front negative articles, represented in the stories by journalists as anti progress and development forces.

Qawmi Madrassah, also known as Darul Ulooms, mainly in South Asia, are independent community run madrasahs, who are distinguished by the fact that they receive no government funding and teach one of many variations of the Darse Nizami Curriculum. The Darse Nizami curriculum is an educational syllabus which was formulated and crystallized in Lucknow, in the late Mughal period. The curriculum traces its origins and influences back into the medieval period, to Nizamuddin Awliya and Al Ghazali.

As in Bangladesh, the Qawmi Madrasahs in the UK receive no government funding, however the medium of instruction is mainly English. The difference in the UK being that madrassah students face no bar with regards to employment in public services or access to universities, hence the majority of graduates, who I encountered, go onto careers other than that of an Imam at a Mosque. A large portion go on to working in the public sector, in the NHS and Prison Services as part of the chaplaincy service, one even ended up as a chaplain for the British armed services. Many go on to universities, either through the traditional route of sitting A-Levels, entering as mature students or the unconventional route of getting the qawmi madrassah certificates accredited by the Pakistani High Commission. After graduating many have gone on to pursue careers either in Teaching, Law or Finance and Accounting. One graduate of Lalbagh Qawmi Madrassah in Dhaka, has gone on to graduate in Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London and then onto running a successful construction company.

The other phenomenon in London, when it comes to the Darse Nizami is the rise in the number of ‘Midnight Madrassas’, evening and part time classes aimed at professionals, workers and students. Here after work or study, students attend classes on religious texts. Many of whom, increasing number being women, have no intention in going onto becoming religious leaders or Imams in the mosque. This brings into question as to what is the essential function of these texts in society, past and present.

“When the Sages arose, they framed the rules of propriety (ritual) in order to teach men, and cause them, by their possession of them, to make a distinction between themselves and brutes.”

Liji – The Confucian Book of Rites

Formally the Darse Nizami, does not confer on its graduates the right to be a religious leader or Imam. What it does confer is the right to read unaided the canon of Arabic religious literature, as well as being a transmitter of the oral tradition that is at his heart. A good comparison and model of understanding, is the similarity between the roles of the Darse Nizami texts and those of the Confucian classics, in Imperial China.

Confucian texts formed the basis of the examination system of the Imperial bureaucracy in China. Thus the dissemination of the texts created a literary class in Chinese society who acted as the guardians and repository of Chinese culture from the 500 BCE upto the beginning of the 20th century. A self appointed class, whose function was to act as the guardians of Chinese civilisation and to be a bedrock of stability in times of economic and political upheaval.

“The Sage of the West, Muhammad was born after Confucius and lived in Arabia. He was so far removed in time and space from the Chinese Sages that we do not know exactly by how much. The languages they spoke are mutually unintelligible. How is it then that their ways are in full accord? The answer is that they were of one mind. Thus their Way is the same.”

Liu Zhi – Tianfang dianli

A similar observation was made by the historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun. Ibn Khaldun in his Muqaddimah distinguished between tribalism or asabiyyah on the basis of blood and that on the basis of a shared educational experience. These networks and bonds of shared educational experience, in the Muslim world today, they can be traced through the distribution and acceptance of certain key texts. A good example is the spread of the core Darse Nizami text, the Hidayah, which was first written in the then Persian region of Greater Khorasan (the land of the rising sun). Today the Hidayah can found being taught in Europe (Bosnia and the Greek Region of Thrace), through Turkey and Central Asia, on to South Asia and even as far as Ningxia in China and Kazan in Russia. Thus it appears the texts and curriculum have a dual function not just instructing individuals in religious rites or dogma, but also creating a collective experience and memory, that supersedes the nation state, that of a shared Islamic Civilisation, the ummah.

“The Way of the Sage is none other than the Way of Heaven.”

Liu Zhi – Tianfang dianli

A Living Intellectual Tradition: In the Shadow of Shahjalal

( L) The birds at the Shahjalal Shrine in Sylhet, descendents of the original birds given to him by the Chisti Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi ( R) Tomb of Shah Jalal in Sylhet

As in the UK, similar Black Swans to the dominant narrative of medieval Islamism versus a modernising Aryanism/Atheism can be found in Bangladesh, in this case, in Sylhet. At the heart of Sylhet city is the complex dedicated to the grave of the Sufi Shahjalal. The grave of the saint sits on top of a mound , and in its shadow at the foot of the mound, next to the main gate, within the complex is a Qawmi Madrassah, known locally as the Dargah Madrassah.

Nearly a decade ago I was visiting a friend from the UK, who enrolled on to the final year of the madrassah. During the visit, I got him to conduct a brief straw survey of his class, asking respondents about their backgrounds and motivation.

The students in the class fell broadly into three categories, corresponding to where they sat in the class (front, middle and back). Around 10% of respondents wanted to pursue a career in teaching, further learning or research. This group normally sat at the front of the class, and for sitting at the front had the privilege to read out the Prophetic traditions that were going to be studied on that day.

The second group comprising of about 60% were made up of students, who came into the madrassah for ‘welfare reasons’. The madrassah life provided them with free or subsidised lodging and food. Graduation from the madrasah, provides a route out of poverty as well as increased social status.Most wanting to opt for a quiet life of an Imam in a village or a small urban mosque.

The third group, 30% (which normally sat at the back of the class) were the most interesting. The students came from a varied background and had diverse ambitions. Many came from the state Aliyah Madrassah sector, but enrolled to access the oral tradition still preserved within the Qawmi madrassas. There were others who were products of the secular education system. For example there was an engineering student, simultaneously completing his degree while attending lectures at the madrasah. Then there was the budding journalist, drafting his articles while the traditions and commentaries were being read out in the class. All of the individuals in this group wanted to pursue a career outside the mosque or madrassa but saw madrassah education as an important companion along those career paths. When asked about the barriers that they face due to prejudice and misconception, they accepted it as a necessary price to pay for the commitment to their beliefs. They saw no contradiction between the modern society they occupy and the image of themselves as successors of a living tradition, first brought to Sylhet by Shahjalal.

Al Ghazali and the Incoherence of the Juktibadi: Then and Now

Shahjalal came to Sylhet from the then Seljuk Turk city of Konya, famous for being the resting place of Rumi. He was a product of the state sponsored education system, that was designed and pioneered by Al Ghazali nearly 200 hundred years earlier and 900 years before our time. Ghazali near the end of his life, penned his autobiography, ‘The Deliverance from Error’, where he described his intellectual and spiritual journey. On the one hand, he wrote about his encounters with religious fundamentalist, who he described as ignorant fools who do more harm than good, by rejecting science and reason in the name of defending Islam.

On the other, he wrote about the militant atheists of his day, who described themselves as free thinkers or ‘philosophers’.These free thinkers in the name of science and reason, declared Islam as a social ill towards progress and development. After various encounters and reading their works, Ghazali concluded, that despite their declarations of following reason, at the very core of their beliefs and attitudes was an irrational prejudice against religion, a domination of the ego over the intellect.

The irrational prejudice, written about by Ghazali over 900 years ago, is alive and kicking in powerful circles in Bangladesh today. This modern manifestation of the ego over the intellect has two parts. First, the argument one hears that religion is the root of most or all of the world’s problems. An irrational belief, given the last 100 years produced the mass slaughters of World War I and II, colonialism, Communism, imperialism, Korea, Vietnam and the Iraq war – all of which had nothing to do with religion.

Second, the doctrine that if one can educate and manipulate enough religious believers to ‘truth’, then the world will be perfect and all our problems will disappear. An irrational myth, following on from the Enlightenment, that physical and social environments could be transformed through scientific and rational manipulations. An irrational dogma that gave us the false utopias, of the Nazis, and Stalinism and the killing fields of Cambodia. As Chris Hedges writes, this irrational belief in, “rational and scientific manipulation of human beings to achieve a perfect world has consigned millions of hapless victims to persecution and death”.

It is not just religious Zealots that incite violence against and kill people for their beliefs. Above: Picture of victims following the state massacre of madrassah students in May Dhaka 2013.

The on going struggle (Jihad) of Liberating Theology, Past and Present

Above attempt by British Raj administrators in trying to thwart the civil disobedience campaign of Hussain Ahmed Madani.

Al Ghazali and his Seljuk patrons, saw their education policy as a prerequisite in their political programme to liberate Muslim lands in the aftermath of the European Crusades. Thus following in the footsteps of Al Ghazali, in 1857 amongst the ashes of Delhi, then burnt down by the British, the seeds of the Qawmi Madrassah movement were sown. The original pioneers saw their educational movement as an essential prerequisite to freeing South Asia from British colonial rule.

After a 150 years it seems, as opposed to many other countries around the world, that in Bangladesh, with a deteriorating human rights situation, the struggle has not finished and still continues. The Avijit Murder of 2015 occurred against a backdrop in Bangladesh, where universal franchise, in terms of free and fair elections, has been suspended and where foreign interests take precedence over domestic concerns. Thus the supposed war on terror on alleged fanatics, provides a convenient figleaf for increasing repression by the security forces against legitimate opposition activists.

These recent battle cries of the war on terror, echo earlier calls against shadowy Islamists at the time of the British Raj. Nearly a hundred years earlier, a madrassah teacher, Hussain Ahmed Madani, arrived at the Nayasorok mosque in Sylhet, to teach and instigate a non violent local movement for home rule against the British. For his activities, he and his followers were persecuted, tortured and labelled as fanatics by the Britishers. Thus it appears a century on, nothing much has changed, after two attempts at independence, things appear to have reverted back to their original state. Thus the Truth after the Event in Bangladesh is this, ‘Yes, the British have left, but they have left behind in charge, bastard offsprings with their Hindustani manservants.’

Following the Dhaka Massacre of May 2013, I had a discussion with Qawmi Madrassa teacher in the UK. He was privy to the discussions of the current and previous Bangladeshi government’s attempt at Qawmi Madrassah reform. He said all parties want reform, the madrassas want to end discrimination against their students, in terms of public sector employment and access to University education. However he added due to ideological vested interests on the Government side, negotiations have been sabotaged both in the previous BNP government and now in the current Awami League one.

He conceded that there are some vested interests within the Qawmi madrassah movement, ‘political opportunists’, who benefit from the status quo, as it gives them ownership over a ghettoised frustrated vote bank. In spite of the lack of resources and existing institutional barriers, he pointed to interesting examples of internal reforms. In the Sylhet region, following a model established in Lucknow, Arabic intensive institutions, with an accelerated Darse Nizami programme have been established. He also cited the example of a Qawmi madrasah in Comilla, which has modern IT facilities and train’s common law judges and public officials in the intricacies of Shariah Law.

As a counter example to Bangladesh, he cited pragmatically oriented reforms in Turkey, where in the 1980s barriers were removed in terms of employment and education to madrassah students (graduates of the Imam Hatip Schools). After those barriers were removed, more than a third of the students went on to graduate in Law, Finance and Business. The current President of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, being an example of an Imam Hatip school graduate choosing a mainstream career path.

Allahu Musta’an Sabran Jamil – Allah it is Whose Help is sought, with comely patience

Solar Eclipse Northern Europe March 2015

“Remember: oppression is temporary. Reality is light, but darkness overtook it. Islam came with a light to extinguish these tyrants, dictators and ignoramuses. Their darkness has covered us, but darkness does not last forever. This is a sign that oppression must come to an end, that this age of tyrannical rule is coming to a close, just as the light follows darkness…”

When Atheism Becomes Religion: America’s New Fundamentalists by Chris Hedges

‘Intellectual Legacy of Shah Wali Allah’: Diagram below showing the fluid and interlinking student teacher relationships in all the varied religious movement in South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula.

Silsilah of the Chistiyyah Sufi Tariqah: Spiritual Chain of Transmission which includes at the end, prominent political figures at the time of Independence from the British (Sulayman Nadwi and Hussain Ahmed Madani).

The article explores perhaps the most powerful and distracting misreading of desh today, the Islamic vs Secular smokescreen. Its origins are traced through the ‘colon’ narrative which paints the majority of it’s inhabitants as an inferior other, to Aryanisation, an attitude supported by another rotten European theory – racial anthropology. Connecting with manifestations of colonial continuity in the Algerian, Muslim experience of France and the doubling up of Aryanisation on the Muslims of Bengal, the debilitating terrorism rents and settlements of the new jomidary are presented along with sacred, indigenous histories of resistance from which we might draw strength, hope and mobilisation.

” (Islamophobia in) France is the worst in Europe and tries to mask it by proclaiming its secular values (sound familiar?), but these values don’t apply to Islam. In fact, French secularism means anything but Islam” Tariq Ali

In a New York meeting during September 2014, Abdul Latif Siddiqui, the then Bangladesh cabinet minister for Post and Communications (formerly for Jute and Textiles) made a statement denigrating the Hajj pilgrimage, crudely commodifying all of its pilgrims and racially slurring Arabs as the descendants of robbers. The minister was a senior member of the ruling Awami League, returned to government earlier in the year in perhaps South Asia’s most dubious general elections ever. There was widespread revulsion as to how a senior politician of a country of over 100 million Muslims could make such statements in public, and after protests he was eventually sacked.

In an academic forum, I witnessed the spectacle of seeing a Bangladeshi academic describing the massacre victims of May 2013 (over 60 unarmed protesters killed) as feral animals that needed to be culled, and another academic justifying the massacre on the basis that the protestors were causing unnecessary traffic congestion in Dhaka. Bangladesh is not exceptional in having to suffer such Macaulayan Misleadership, that is to say firmly in the thrall of white supremacy and its epistemicidal traditions. To the bemusement of many observers, outrageous colonial continuities are explicitly written into much of Francophone Africa’s independence documentation.

Recognition of the globality and gravity of this condition is the first step to unreading Bangladesh. The next step being, unwinding the roots and after effects of the racial supremacy woven into the fabric of Bengali nationalist selfhood, eventually creating new spaces for indigenous discourse to be heard.

We saw another manifestation of this contempt for the local and thrall for the colonial as a large section of elite in the social media in Bangladesh gave unequivocal support (#jesuischarlie) to the French magazine, Charlie Hebdo, following the massacre there, whilst maintaining their silence on Bangladesh governments systematic destruction of press freedom. In their submission, they conveniently ignored the fact that the magazine disproportionately targeted the marginalised Muslim minority of France, viewing them as a ‘Clandestino’ fifth column. Commentators such as Richard Seymour and Professor Tariq Ramadan, rightly called out the publication as racist, while a former writer for the publication, Olivier Cyran, had previously pointed out that,

“Belief in one’s own superiority, accustomed to looking down on the common herd, is the surest way to sabotage one’s own intellectual defences and to allow them to fall over in the least gust of wind.”

In fact, to the observant eye, this contempt can be seen running through the corporate media of Bangladesh as well as the elite, in their political pronouncements, reporting and academic masquerades. Here, the urban and rural poor and their mainly Muslim culture, is infantalised, primitivised and decivilised into an essentialised mindless mob. To rephrase Fanon, talking down to the mainly Muslim poor in Bangladesh, as well as ‘Islamophobic’ insults make the Muslim, “the eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance for which he is not responsible”. Thus the precursor to any oppression, exploitation and elimination is the process of differentiation and dehumanisation.

Take Tasneem Khalil’s recent op ed in the Dhaka Tribune, which blames Muslims worldwide for being somehow responsible for the January 7 attack in Paris. The newspaper cites attitudes of Egyptian Muslims in a poll, but omits that most of the respondents in the poll live in one of the most economically unequal and repressive countries in the world, as if to ask someone whose house is on fire, why he is so agitated? The article also misreads the opinion polls of respondents in Muslim countries, ignoring nuances, hence mimicking the method ,attitudes and conclusion of Islamophobes in the West, such as Bill Maher and Sam Harris.

If we skip back a few years, we can recall when the editor of the same ‘liberal’ newspaper, Zafar Sohban (then as assistant editor in the Daily Star) wrote/incited in a polite tone, for the elimination of Bangladesh’s ‘Original Sin’ of Muslim identity based politics. Arguing for the restoration of ‘Mission 1971’ by the cleansing of poison from the bloodstream and righting history. In doing so he (un)intentionally resonates the mood music, intellectual cover and political anesthetic for the new ‘Guerra Sucia’ (Dirty War) afoot in Bangladesh. A Dirty War in which so many opposition political activists have been abducted, disappeared and murdered. Leaving in the wake orphans, widows and terrified communities throughout Bangladesh.

In the midst of the obligatory, hypocritical media cacophony, author Will Self made an insightful intervention on the justice of journalism, that it should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. In the elite blogosphere and corporate press of Bangladesh, with its latent Islamophobia, such ‘crusading churnalism’ as in the case of the Dhaka Tribune, does the inverse, comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted, thus reinforcing the hierarchy and power left over by former colonial masters, and kept intact by their successors.

Beyond the Fog of (the Phony) War: Decoding the riddle of Bangladesh

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.

Hamlet – William Shakespeare

Polite Islamophobia in Bangladesh is defended and justified by the myth of a ‘No Stopping the Cavalry – Long War’ of Bengali exceptionalism. This is an imaginary, intergenerational and Manichean struggle between the forces of a muscular ethnic and linguistic nationalism, wrapped in eurocentric values pitted against the global forces medieval Islamism. These goggles view the, ‘Cops of the World’ War on Terror as a boon for sapping the strength of this global Islamism, eventually leading to its elimination.

Grounding ourselves in current and historical data, we view this imaginary war as a smokescreen for a struggle between a privileged elite and an ever emboldening population, a distraction from the struggle for more visible participation in the state and society at large by a hitherto marginalised majority. The languages and symbolisms used in the struggle reflect the traditions inherited, internalised and embodied by its participants., the elite from their European colonial masters, the masses from their indigenous tradition, Islam, and everywhere inbetween. Globalisation, coupled with the War on Terror, has (re)turned the balance towards the masses, leading to the somewhat painful (re)emergence of Muslim nationalistic discourse and identity of the state, in Bangladesh.

Seeing past the smokescreen requires that we excavate behind the fairytale. We have to go beyond that the sitting regime came to power on the coat tails of a ‘development partner’ imposed military coup, and has manifested the fascistic one party state ideology that only it can yield. We must travel and dwell in the roots of the present ex-colonial state, if not further, with a wide angled lens and a longer duration, to comprehend the reality and after effects of the colonial encounter.

Colonosibilite’ and the new ‘colons’

Sixty years ago in French occupied North Africa, familiar tensions existed between a foreign imposed ‘colon’ government and the mainly Muslim populace. Here, racist and Islamophobic prejudice combined with economic domination created an entrenched two-tier society, sitting on a tinderbox.

It was into this milieu that the Algerian Muslim writer and intellectual Malik Bennabi published his ‘Vacation de Islam’ (Vocation of Islam) in 1954, to synchronise with the outbreak of the Algerian War of Independence against the French. During this 8 year long war, 400 000 to 1 500 000 people are thought to have died, out of a population of 10 million, it was one of the defining anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century.

In the Vocation, Malik Bennabi presents the concept of colonsibilite’, the process through which elites in Algeria and other Muslim countries had declined culturally and intellectually to a stage where colonialism was inevitable. Bennabi distinguishes between a country simply conquered and occupied, and a colonised country. The latter having lost its own cultural bearings, internalising what we might call a ‘House Muslim’ mentality upon the perceived superiority of the colonial masters.

Unlike French colonialism in North Africa which was more direct, British imperial rule in Bengal was more indirect, tending to rule in partnership with local intermediaries, who in turn helped them exploit the local populace and ecology. In a familiar image and model to that painted by Bennabi and Fanon, but upon a different precolonial civilisational milieu, we have in the alienated culture of Bangladesh’s mental elite. Its ‘cultural’ heyday, of British Raj Calcutta, are situated upon the devastation of 1770 Bengal Famine, the land grab of the 1793 Permanent Settlement, and the production of a select and moneyed class, pliant and beholden to the British.

Flogging the dead horses of the Aryanisation Apocalypse: The Common Roots of Islamophobia

During the 19th Century, the multiculture of Bengal was subjected to Double Aryanisation from the blackboards of British administrators and their local rentier-landlord development partners. This mirrored the Aryanisation of Classical Civilisation in Europe at the time, and the expulsion of references to African and Asiatic influences on the Ancient Greeks, as demonstrated by Martin Bernal in his Black Athena series. Bernal shows that during the 19th century there was whitewashing of the origins of Western Civilization, a process which he termed Aryanisation.

Aryanisation is a product of an imagined Aryan identity formulated by the 18th century French Orientalist, Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron. In the 19th century the concept was developed further by the French Arthur de Gobineu into a hierarchy of races. In this hierarchy of scientific racism, ‘superior’ races like the Aryans are juxtaposed against inferior races, such as Semites (Arabs and Jews) and ‘Negroes’. It judges that inferior races have an incapacity to grasp metaphysics, philosophy or the arts.

Aryanisation was forged in a bigoted Europe, where in the zeitgeist of Imperialism, nations and national cultures were given shape and supportive national myths. These artificial constructs provided soothing balms to conscience of the coloniser and his local side kick, justifying on a rational basis, through a racial anthropology, the economic and political exploitation of indigenous masses in an increasingly globalised capitalist system.

In colonial Bengal, Double Aryanisation was achieved through ideological linguistics and an elite schooling system that remains in service today, these are now busy reproducing inequalities despite two attempts at national self determination. The eviction of references to Muslim (Persian and Arabic) influence on ‘pure’, ‘chaste’ Bengali language has been demonstrated by Anandita Ghosh’s recent work on the artificial construction of the Bengali language in the 19th century, functionally it delegitimises indigenous expressions and discomforts the subaltern. As elsewhere in South Asia, this schooling of elites would create, what Professor Akbar Ahmed dubs, MacCaulay’s Chickens, a class of natives, Indian in appearance but Anglicised in term of education, taste and cultural norms. But in Bangladesh, ‘the Animals at the farm, in the form of chickens have been forcefully inbred by their farmers, to form a hybrid breed, twice removed from the original colonial encounter, and twice alienated from their natural environment.

Zooming out to other human experiences, the after effects of similar (but one-stage), ‘Road to Nowhere’ Aryanising projects unfolded in Iran through the writings of Mirza Agha Khan Kermani, put into practice by the Pahlavi dynasty. In Turkey initialising through the works of Ziya Gokalp, it reaching its zenith with the reforms of Mustafa Kamal.

The alienating and socially debilitating effects of the of this Aryanisation in Bengal during the British Raj was noted in the 20th century, by the historian Arnold J Toynbee in his A Study of History. He wrote of the anguish of British administrators, writing about the phenomena of Calcutta, creating an intellectually bankrupt class of rentier political activists and ideologues.

This sentiment was echoed nearly a hundred years on in independent Bangladesh, by the novelist Zia Rahman Haider. There in front of the ‘Bricks in the Wall’, on the hallowed grounds of ‘Oxford of the East’ Dhaka University, he declared, ‘Bangladesh as a land of dead ideas, where new concepts are throttled at birth and never get passed on because of social, political and class barriers.’

A good example of this double battery hen’s Aryanised epistemology at work in Bangladesh, is in the production of a mainly ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ academic attitude in Bangladesh. One facet of this psychological suffocating (‘Breathe’) malaise afflicting large sections of the intelligentsia can be seen in the Islamophobic discrimination against madrasah students in higher education. For example Dhaka and Jahangirnagar University’s have barred the admission of government run (Aliya) madrasa graduates into Arts and Science departments. This imposed barrier to learning and flourishing has nothing to do with merit, Aliya graduates have occupied the top 20 positions in the admission test in Jahangirnagar University. The matter was taken up in the High Court and Supreme Court which lifted the bar but many universities are unwilling to admit madrasa graduates in many departments regardless. That the ‘Brain Damage’ university leaderships saw fit to segregate ‘Us and Them’ the different learning traditions of the society speaks volumes as to their intellectual insecurity, if not their fundamental institutional failure.

Frances Harrison in a presentation in London shed some light on this attitude. She explained that some university teachers in Bangladesh complained to her about their fear of being ‘Eclipsed’ by madrasah students in the class room. They explained that madrasah students knew more about religion than the actual teachers, and often corrected them, thus undermining their authority in front of other students.

War on Terror Times: The new Zamindery and its Terrorism Rent

If patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel in the 18th century, it has been replaced by the War on Terror in this one. The refuge, allows the continued oiling of ‘The Welcome to the Machine’ post independence status quo, allowing a ‘colon elite’, to carry on their brutal and wasteful and dangerous reign over a population which does not share their values.

Recognition and analysis of this enterprise is broadening, with the idea of ‘Terrorism Rent’ describing how regimes frame their domestic political opposition as a security issue with the prism of the ‘War on Terror’. In this Faustian pact, international interests/donors turn a blind eye to internal suppression, while providing foreign aid, valued by many. to prop up corrupt regimes and their dependants. In return the host countries, allow Western interests to gain strategic influence and footholds, under the guise of military assistance and countering Chinese encroachment in the Third World. In this sense, the ‘War on Terror’ functions as an ideological narrative that underpins the capacity of Western and American states to sustain control over an increasingly fragile and changing international system. For example in Afghanistan we have a Norwegian government report revealing how covert indirect US support to both to the Taliban in Afghanistan and overt support to the Afghan authorities, is used to ‘calibrate the level of violence’, thus sustaining support for US military intervention and presence in the region.

In sub saharan Africa we see a return of the French. In Bangladesh, there has been an increase in military assistance by the UK, focusing on counter insurgency under the comical doublespeak of ‘Democracy Stabilisation’. A British ‘Democracy Stabilization’ experience gained in the decade long occupation of the Helmand Province of Afghanistan, where in 13 years British troops were responsible for the deaths of over 500 Afghan civilians and the injuries of thousands and yet did not capture or kill a single Al Qaida operative.

The unintended consequences of the ongoing ‘War on Terror’, and the accompanying intensification of Islamophobia that comes with it, is the counter intuitive awakening of an assertive Muslim identity and consciousness and what one would term the rise of Muslim nationalism. As in the face of such hostility and prejudice, even the most secular Muslim, as happened in Northern Ireland amongst Irish Catholics, is forced to defend Islam and the rights of a Muslim identity.

In Bangladesh, this is seen in the enduring support the massacred rural Madrassah students and their affiliates still receive in all sections of society, including ever growing numbers of the governing and commercial elite. Farhad Mazhar in London termed the massacre as a victory for the rural madrassah students, in terms of putting a halt to the de-Islamification and Aryanisation policies of the current Awami League government and being a catalyst for a re emerging of a mainstream Muslim political discourse and identity in Bangladesh. Six decades ago Fanon identified the same phenomenon amongst the native Algerians, vis a vis their French colon rulers. In Fanon’s essay, Algeria Unveiled, the French attempt to unveil the Algerian women did not simply turn the veil into symbol of resistance, it become a technique to camouflage, a means of struggle. Thus every veiled women became a suspect and also at the same time a sign of resistance.

To conclude, the reassertion of Muslim political discourse in Bangladesh, is not as what many colon elite academics home and abroad would market as the thin end of an edge of a rising global Islamic militancy. As elsewhere, it is profoundly connected to long term local experiences and demands on post colonial state institutions, to dignify and include the identity of those who they claim to represent. This concern is expressed in an indigenous tradition and language of the people, which in the case of Bangladesh, is Islam.

Emperors and Dervishes – The Mantle of the Prophet and a Tradition of Resisting Empire

If a wound touches you, a like wound already has touched the opposing ones; such days We deal out in turn among men, and that God may know who are the people of faith, and that He may take witnesses from among you; and God loves not the evildoers. (3:140)

Quran -verses referring to the Battle of Uhd

Countering external and internal Aryanising aggression, is the tradition of resisting Empire in Bangladesh, a Quranic semantic field of meaning consciously and subliminally deep rooted in the collective psyche. I was fortunate to be acquainted with an example of this living tradition, when I met the Principal of a Qawmi Madrasah in Sylhet who was a scholar of prophetic traditions. A contemporary of Allama Shafi, the leader of Hefazot e Islam, the shaykh had the triple distinction of being imprisoned and tortured by the British, arrested and imprisoned under the Pakistani generals of United Pakistan, and being physically assaulted and imprisoned in his last years by the first Awami League government of 1996 -2000. Everytime he was imprisoned he had with him the khirqa, shawl given to him by his teacher, who was imprisoned and tortured by the British, who in turn received the shawl from his teacher who was also imprisoned and tortured by the British, who in turn received a shawl from his teachers of the Madrasah Rahimiyyah in Delhi, and who were at the forefront at the 1857 War of Liberation against the British invaders. A tradition of the khirqa and seeking justice going back through the ages to the earliest Muslim community, to Imam Hussain in Karbala, Abdullah ibn Zubair in Makkah and the Prophet Muhammad’s struggle against the Quraysh.

‘The greatest Jihad is to speak the truth in the face of an unjust tyrant.’

The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)

We see the same non violent resistance in Turkey against the state in the life and struggles of the Naqshbandi Sufi and Kurd, Said Nursi. Who for his criticism of Mustafa Kemal, was imprisoned, starved and poisoned by the Turkish state. Yet the Turkey of today, with the reintroduction of the Ottoman Arabic script in the High Schools, is not the Turkey of Mustafa Kemal and the Kemalist generals but the Turkey of Said Nursi. The current political establishment of the late Menderes and Ozal,and the presently feuding Gulen and Erdogan were influenced by Said Nursi’s movement and teachings.

Straight after the Dhaka centred massacre of the 5/6th of May 2013, fully armed members of the Bangladeshi security forces attempted to storm the Hathazari Madrassah near Chittagong, but were beaten back by local residents and students of the madrassah. Soon afterwards, I interviewed a graduate of Hathazari to gather more information. I asked him his thoughts post massacre, especially with Allama Shafi, the movement leader in police custody. He gave me a somewhat cryptic reply by narrating the story of the Indian Saint, Imam Rabbani – Sheikh Ahmed Sirhindi.

The Naqshbandi Sirhindi was galvanised into a course diametrically opposed to the Mughal state when his father in law was executed by the then Emperor Akbar, for sacrificing a cow at Eid ul Adha. Sirhindi was eventually imprisoned by Akbar’s son Jahangir, arrested on the grounds of failing to bow to the Emperor. After the arrest, rebellion broke out in the Empire in protest. The rebels eventually captured the Emperor and asked Sirhindi for advice. Contrary to expectations he ordered the rebels to release Jahangir.

Impressed with the Sufi Sheikh, the alcoholic Jahangir kept him imprisoned but not before elevating him to the role of advisor, eventually releasing him. The Emperor outlived this Dervish, as Sirhindi died a few years after his release, however, his own grandson Aurangzeb would be initiated into the Naqshbandi tariqah by Sirhindi’s son.Aurungzeb would go onto commission the codification of Islamic Law, the Fatwa Alamghiri and patronise the institution that co produced it, the Madrasah Rahmiyyah.

Aside from the enduring indigenous traditions and the impact on the War on Terror. Geo-economic shifts place Bangladesh into an interesting situation . With the centre of global economic and cultural activity returning from the mid Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, we are reminded of half a millenium ago, when Mughal India and Imperial China accounted for nearly two thirds of world manufacturing.

Such a change in resource and human flows opens up possibilities and multiple trajectories, of ‘Learning to Fly’ and take off, from one party rule in China, the managed democracy of Singapore and the petro-autocracies of the Gulf, to the more accommodating polities of West Asia and the populist democracies and liberation theologies of Latin America. Greater exposure to possible political futures is yeast for the imagination, of how we might be more reflective and inclusive of our traditions, values and historical experiences.

Surveying the present political field of Bangladesh, the ‘East Wind’ that is currently blowing through Bangladesh, does not originate from the current autocratic Awami League (AL) government, but goes back further, and is more systemic. from the silent, clenched buttocks of a ‘Bhadralok’ class. An unwieldy coalition of military and civilian bureaucrats, civil society leaders and businessmen, who are now currently keeping the AL in power. Who by their desperation of holding on to colonial privileges, are creating a vacuum, by dismantling the very state that has been set up to protect them.

Faced with shifting global power geometries and historical patterns, the Double Aryanised elites of Bangladesh might perceive two stark choices before them. Either they equitably share power and resources with the indigenous mainly Muslim population, reflect their values in state institutions and respect their dignity, as what happened in Turkey, or they be dragged kicking and screaming to the firing squads as in Iran, during the revolution of 1979.

One option they do not have is the ‘Comfortably Numb’ King Canute fantasy of hoping to drive back the winds of change and sands of history that are enveloping them and their exclusive ethnic Bengali exceptionalism, proclaiming:

As the country broke out into camps protecting sentiments, religious and nationalist, the last few weeks, two words stole into my orifices like some perfumed incense, flavored femme fatale, and I followed it, to this public domain where one is still able to speak or squeak. The two words constitute a single idea. Sentimental education— something I rather arbitrarily associate with the garden-inscribed, Manor-library sensibilities of characters in Jane Austen novels, although it originates in French literature, in Gustave Flaubert’s book of the same name. So what is a sentimental education, a mere education in literature? Ah, less than that, an education that arouses an inactive passion, one that remains suspended in that image-world of dreams. At times when I discuss the never mirthless politics of Bangladesh with my art critic colleagues, I often get a feeling they think politics is a sentimental vocation, a creature of ‘abeg.’ None of these alternative words to sentiments—passion and ‘abeg’– adequately describe the distance between a trigger-happy sentimentality, swift to offer others as lambs to the slaughter, and the wild, white terrain of dispassionate justice (think Anna Akmatova) that I associate with conscience: a kind of antithesis of the lynch mob justice of the kind that took place on October 6th, when Sundarban villagers and police beat robbers mercilessly until they could not walk in what was reported later as shootouts and gunfights…But let me describe the distance through the window of an event that has almost disappeared from collective memory.

The day the police locked the gates of the worker-occupied Tuba factory in Hossain market (August 6th), many of the female workers had been on hunger strike for a week, many were lying beside Sramik Oikya Forum leader Moshrefa Mishu while others were sitting on the table tops where clothes are made. The day they broke in, August 7th, these men in blue found the girls protecting Mishu and others in an unbreakable outer circle. One particular officer, demanding the leaders of the movement come forward, threatened to ‘Rape all of them’, and hurled other names…police literacy in such slang seems remarkably high. The girls, they refused to budge. Finally, as they pushed into the inner circle, the girls and their male co-workers were forced forward, moving in ripples, some falling down the stairs…taking beatings, but never quite giving up the protective space. Outside loitered what remained of the mixed bag of League goons, police women and dalal workers (as we called them) who had already fought skirmishes with workers, injuring solidarity activists, the day before. Not much remained in the form of a human chain outside…Buses were ready to pick up the workers and take them to receive diminished pay and benefits months late.

In my piece in New Age that came out the day before the police broke into the factory, I heralded superlative new worlds, a ‘paradigm shift.’ On hindsight, it appears to me as perfectly obtuse, but, I knew it was some kind of delirious hope that was working in the midst of things. But I’ve never had the misgiving– even after Delwar Hossian got his way, using workers’ salaries and bonus as a bargaining chip for his bail, and we walked not blindly but rather wide-eyed into his trap—that what we or they were doing was ‘sentimental’. Everyone present at was moved by something more akin to ‘following a truth to its logical conclusion.’ They would not be blackmailed. Yes, some vanguardism, but again, hardly sentimental.

And it is this distance between venturing a notion of justice and approximating it—that journey between a principle and its actualization in struggle (admittedly a fetishized word of the left) — that distinguishes this ‘un-sentimental’ world from the world where sentiments are protected by law, the mob or by the self-proclaimed guardians of the sentiments or the ideology of the language movement and liberation war, a world where there is not a split-second between a trigger and its target. The ‘students’ of a sentimental education did not stop to consider the pages of history books, nor offer a reason why suddenly nine others were also blacklisted from Shahid Minar without having any association whatsoever with a dangerously ubiquitous term, ‘Razakar.’ And yet, it is hard to tell off these madmen pursuing the injury to ‘sentiments.’ Not too long ago much more historically literate students and activists were running here and there, their sentiments also hurt, almost before a thought could be formulated…Thus this tendency is not limited to these few young men, to mobs in villages or to guardians of the faith. Some run to embassies, some to mosques, some, now, unfortunately, to the Minar. I venture the liberation war was not fought over sentiments but deep structural issues and a profound sense of injustice. The Shabagh movement certainly had more than sentiments to begin with; it had a profound sense of injustice. And the equations were not quite so arbitrary, generalized and simple, in the beginning. But the distance from there to here…warrants some introspection regarding the limitations of a sentimental education, which is all they seemed to have to rely on once the blacklisting began.

If tomorrow, the police who screamed ‘Rape to all of you’ sat on the TV screen and grinned unrepentant, I have a feeling in my gut that sentiments would not run very deep.

We would forgive him, as though he had said a faux-pas as children do. After all, he too got his sentimental education and it taught him nothing about the dignity of women, much the less workers. One need only read the headlines in the back pages…

Our passions are like our reasons for our actions: not principled, humane or deep, but sentimental, superficial and within our comfort zone. No white nights charting the immense, dark seas of human action with a moral compass… who cares about ethics when there are Sentiments. And when good and bad are pre-determined, in moral equations that do not even need a child’s exegesis of the assumed Word, a conscience– active, alive, non sentimental– is a luxury.